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Puck is a weekly webcomic that, in the words of one fan, is "mostly irreverent humor concerning a pretty girl with freckles and a hot she-devil who wears fan-service costumes." Surreal fantasy slice-of-life crazy-type stuff about the world's funniest redhead! Updates Tuesday.

Puck 458

NEW VOTING INCENTIVE! 20th ANNIVERSARY BONUS COMIC!
That’s right! Puck marks its 20th anniversary this September! Twenty years ago this comic began publishing in the McMaster Silhouette! Some of you weren’t even alive back then! To celebrate, I’ve put up a bonus comic strip this month which serves as a little homage to the very first Puck comic. Vote for Puck on TWC to check it out!

At least one reader saw this joke coming. I’d love to say that I often take punch lines in unexpected directions, but … I don’t.

Also, I’m just going to say that though the ‘baseball bat with nails in it’ concept is a popular one in zombie movies, post-apocalyptic fiction and more, I seriously question the inherent wisdom of putting nails in your bat. Most baseball bats are made from hickory, which is one of the harder woods in existence. Putting a nail straight through it would likely just snap the wood lengthwise and make your bat garbage. You’d have to pre-drill holes for the nails, then carefully sink the nails, and I still think you’d be compromising the structural integrity of the bat. Not to mention the difficulties that would result from your spiky bat getting stuck in its target. It’s just a bad choice overall.

Besides, when it comes to fighting the undead or the interdimensional, I have long held that a cricket bat is the gentleman’s choice in arms.

The ‘barbed wire’ thing is a little better, but I’m not really sure the tiny barbs really do much. I mean, a simple baseball bat is fine. Why is everyone always so crazy about baseball bat augmentation.

It takes the weight of the bat, the speed of your swing, and focuses it on a single point, i.e., that of a nail, maximizing impact. So, you take the approximately 30 oz that a bat weighs, the speed of the swing, then compress that momentum to the tip of a nail and you have a major ouch, instead of having it spread out over the face of the bat. Another way to augment would be to sheath the bat in blades and/or wedges.

Actually, the mace. The nails would make it a morning star. Both are ways to eff up armor to allow swords through. If they can get through tempered and heat treated steel, they’ll probably get through half rotten flesh and bone.

Eh, zombies are rarely if ever armored so a spiked mace would not be much more effective than a plain bat – depending on that it takes to take down the zombie of course – zombies being fictional, some just keep coming after you break their skulls, others collapse after a solid smash.

An ax is slightly harder to use than a mace since the blade has to be oriented with the line of the swing but much more effective against an unarmored opponent since they can both smash skulls and dismember. They are also available in your friendly neighborhood hardware store, and sometimes stored as fire axes in public buildings.

1. It’s up early. Thank you.
2. Hell has no idea the fury of a girl gamer who lost her partner.
3. Hopefully I’m the first to say this worth the hope it doesn’t influence the comic, but it looks like Daphne is wearing a hoodie.

i agree on the ‘hoodie’ part, especially with the colour of her shirt being near identical to her hair´s….the completely 100% straight look is not my cup of tea, makes her face look too long, and the bangs are kinda meh too – but i´ve got to admit its great attitude-camouflage. i mean, in panel 2 she looks near angelic, only to show her true colours in panel 3. that blonde won´t know whats hitting her, until she´s spewing teeth 😉

This reminds me of Autumn of Precocious, who uses cuteness as a weapon to the point that she wears a schoolgirl outfit all the time, even though her school does not require one.

And I still think Daphne I should maturing more than she realises, she just doesn’t want to admit it, so she falls back to the revenge excuse.

And yes, a cricket bat in indeed the gentleman’s choice of bludgeoning weapons, though a shovel can also be effective and versatile.
As far as nails go, to paraphrase Ridcully; ‘anything that cannot be disposed of with a couple of wacks from a length of solid wood is probably immune to nails as well’

I understand your argument but it has a few flaws. First of a larger flat surface actually disperses the force and would deliver far less per square CM than the smaller surface area of the baseball bat. In addition the lager mass of the cricket bat would mean that if swung by the same person it would cause them to do it at a lower acceleration creating less force.

If you hit with the flat side of the cricket bat, sure. If you hit with the *edge*, on the other hand, you benefit both from the greater concentration of force and less air resistance when swinging. Though I suppose that would require a decent amount of dexterity to pull off consistently.

You’re doing a nail bat wrong if you’re trying to pound nails though the wood.
One pounds the nails in just a little bit (and inch or so), not so much to pound them all the way through, but so that the heads stick out, and can themselves be pulled out and left in wounds by the force of the violence behind them.
Trying to pound nails all the way through is just foolishness and requires some long Jesus nails… the kind that are $2/each at the hardware store. That’s impractical and not a cost effective nail bat at all.

How about if you get a leather strip, push nails all the way through, the wrap the leather strip around the bat with the heads pointed inwards, and the points pointing outwards. Tie in place and you have a nailed bat with some protection for the bat, which you can also remove if necessary.
Or you could just wrap barbed wire round the bat.

Realistically, it’s much more for intimidation. As a previous user has mentioned, there’s not much more a nail bat is gonna do to something that isn’t sufficiently injured by a regular bat.
It just looks scary and nasty, but it’s MUCH harder to claim any kind of self defense when using a ail bat instead of a regular bat.
A nail bat is in and of itself evidence of premeditation.

Now see, Daphne said all that, but I notice how vulnerable she looks in panel two.
We none of us like to hear we’re changing, and there’s something unpleasant about hearing you’ve changed for the better because it implies you used to be less, somehow.
Daphne identifies as a bad girl, a mercenary, a rogue. Hearing she’s growing up would hit her hard, I think, leading to the typical Daphne-denial of panel three.

Silly as it may be of me, I’m holding out hope this is part of her slow development. We saw the process begin after the Schnorf incident. Wrongheaded as it was, it continued when Taylor invited Hannah Vanbeek to the dance.

In regards to “baseball bat with nails”: I have played so much Dead Rising using a Spiked Bat as my primary weapon, I can guarantee that when they get stuck on a zombie’s head, you’re mostly just going to be annoyed for a while.

As for the comic: I figured her personality wouldn’t change. Glad to see I was right.

Finally, voting incentive: It made me chuckle. Nice throwback to the first Puck strip (just with Miranda present, too).

Personally, I’ve never gotten why the baseball bad with nails in it are the favored weapon in a zombie movie; zombies require slashing weapons or explosive weapons to take them down. Blunt force weapons do quarter to half damage (depending on the ruleset) and piercing weapons like a rapier or bullets in this case (since they are intended to cause bleeding out and organ damage) to be useless. Only a slashing weapon, like a knife or an axe in the modern day (and most swords in a medieval setting), or a gun with either a high caliber round, or can do a lot of damage over a wide area like a shotgun can, are capable of taking out a zombie.

Re: Baseball bat. Nails, barbed wire, broken glass, whatever – just don’t use an aluminum (or aluminium, for our other English-speaking friends) bat. Louisville Slugger is considered the best brand for the purpose.

Well, is there a possibility that she’s a reverse werewolf? That on every full moon, she turns back into a human? Just saying. That’s such a cool concept, I am tempted to make it canon. I’m not making it canon, but I’m tempted.

Honestly, kitty treats that look like candy canes would sell amazingly around Christmas.

But thanks. I don’t feel very good about my legacy. I see all these other webcomics that are way more successful, or even worse, I see a lot of webcomic artists that were able to springboard from their comic to success in other (grander) media, and I feel really crummy. On the one hand, I guess twenty years is something to celebrate, but on the other hand, it means I’m still here and haven’t actually graduated to doing anything better. I am thankful, though, that there are people out there who view my creative output as something to not feel shame about.

i’m sorry you don’t feel like a success. You’re far far beyond all those who didn’t even try.

You’ve published more than Emily Dickinson did when she was alive. Just wait til you’re dead, you’ll be so very popular! Wait, that didn’t come out as encouraging as a meant.

I feel strongly that your story on testicular cancer is especially valuable. To appeal to the general audience you might have to redraw it with a baseline human cast but I don’t think it needs any script changes to be marketable.